Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[whydoibother]

Today someone actually turned to me in surprise when I mentioned I read actual books, because they only read, sorry, listen, to audio "books".

Might as well watch another man have sex with your wife instead of doing it yourself

But that's what you are doing when you read a book instead of write a book yourself, cuck.

 

[turkishronin]

Today someone actually turned to me in surprise when I mentioned I read actual books, because they only read, sorry, listen, to audio "books".

Might as well watch another man have sex with your wife instead of doing it yourself

But that's what you are doing when you read a book instead of write a book yourself, cuck.

When I read books it amounts to having indirect sex with the author's mind

 

[Riddler]

Today someone actually turned to me in surprise when I mentioned I read actual books, because they only read, sorry, listen, to audio "books".

I listen to maybe 10 books a year and only read 0-1. There is a lot of time to fill when my hands and eyes are busy.

My actual reading is mostly for work and some journalism.

 

[whydoibother]

Today someone actually turned to me in surprise when I mentioned I read actual books, because they only read, sorry, listen, to audio "books".

Might as well watch another man have sex with your wife instead of doing it yourself

But that's what you are doing when you read a book instead of write a book yourself, cuck.

When I read books it amounts to having indirect sex with the author's mind

When you listen to an audio book, it amounts to getting a blowjob by a guy who had indirect sex with the author. Degrees of Kevin Bacon, you know.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Audiobooks just aren’t the same as reading the book yourself. You completely miss out on the whole point of reading, which is how the book plays in your mind as you’re reading it. You’re no long an active participant with an audiobook. They’re more like an audio play of the book, which can be good too, but it’s also a whole different thing.

 

[Harthwain]

Audiobooks are great for commuting. Or when you want to listen to something while doing something else. The strong point of audiobooks is their vocal aspect: good voice actors and sound effects make it a different experience than reading a book. Look up The Cybrarian on YouTube and his audiobooks on Conan (link to the playlist:

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlFcav_ti8rkUvq2sqnHxKQ6AmeSN-2QK

).

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

Just checked my Kindle stats. It says I've read for the last 471 consecutive days and 92 consecutive weeks. Total books read is 452 over the last four years. My total count is higher than that since I also read stuff in dead tree form that the Kindle doesn't know about.

I've never listened to an audio book in my life.

 

[Nano]

Audiobooks just aren’t the same as reading the book yourself. You completely miss out on the whole point of reading, which is how the book plays in your mind as you’re reading it. You’re no long an active participant with an audiobook. They’re more like an audio play of the book, which can be good too, but it’s also a whole different thing.

But if you only read the book, you won't get to hear Prince Harry talk about rubbing his mother's lip cream on his penis.

 

[soulburner]

Audiobooks just aren’t the same as reading the book yourself. You completely miss out on the whole point of reading, which is how the book plays in your mind as you’re reading it. You’re no long an active participant with an audiobook. They’re more like an audio play of the book, which can be good too, but it’s also a whole different thing.

I cannot stand audiobooks. I tried listening to a few and they're all the same: the narrator speaks so god damn slowly I forget what the story is before he or she finishes a sentence.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Audiobooks are like cuckolding. Instead of doing something yourself, you just watch or listen to someone else doing it.

 

[gurugeorge]

Audiobooks just aren’t the same as reading the book yourself. You completely miss out on the whole point of reading, which is how the book plays in your mind as you’re reading it. You’re no long an active participant with an audiobook. They’re more like an audio play of the book, which can be good too, but it’s also a whole different thing.

I cannot stand audiobooks. I tried listening to a few and they're all the same: the narrator speaks so god damn slowly I forget what the story is before he or she finishes a sentence.

Yeah I find that too. When you're reading you basically take in whole chunks of sentences pretty quickly. When the words are presented in realtime, it's sooooo slow.

Audiobooks are good for philosophy though, where there's the opposite problem - the habit of reading fast could trip you up, whereas having the text presented slowly helps you think around what's being spoken at a good pace.

 

[Latelistener]

This Tim Cain's quote was related to the question (22:53): "What is the thing you (Cain) miss the most from the old days?".
His answer was alarming: " I suppose I miss being able to make a game without so much advanced planning and of constant oversight. "It weird and I hope I don't depress anyone who want to get in the game industry, but even now, after 41 years, I have people second-guessing everything I do, "are you sure you want to put that in?", "are you sure that make sense for this setting", "are you sure it's a good feature to put that in?, and I'm like, we can talk about that again, and it's weird because some of the thing people have told me are just so strange, I had somebody tell me that our factories in outer world shouldn't have smoke stacks on them, because smoke stacks are not sci-fi, and I was like, have you seen the beignnig of Blade Runner movie?, have you seen city of lost children?."

There is an indication of self scrutiny and censorship that deriaves from key creative postions and from lower postion creative employees in Obsidian and probably in other studios. This kind of behavior has a destructive outcome on the final product, I think it's one's of the driving forces of decline that we witnessing in entertainment in general across the 10's.

Sounds like Cain should join his old pals Anderson and Moore at Fargo's Playhouse if he wants to get away from Urquhart and Parker-style micromanagement.

Maybe he should join McComb instead. Then again, I heard Cain is retired and I also don't trust him and Leonard anymore.

 

[Roguey]

Then again, I heard Cain is retired and I also don't trust him and Leonard anymore.

Last time I checked, he's not, he just works remotely from Washington.

 

[Duraframe300]

Then again, I heard Cain is retired and I also don't trust him and Leonard anymore.

Last time I checked, he's not, he just works remotely from Washington.

Remote work is basically retirement. Nobody cares and its not going to have much of an impact anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

It's been a while since there's been a mega-interview of this size with Feargus: https://www.gamepressure.com/editor...ian-survived-feargus-urquhart-interview/za604

"My greatest triumph? Obsidian survived." Interview with Feargus Urquhart​

Creator, manager, darling killer. The man responsible for shipping RPGs that shaped the imagination of a whole generation. We talked to Feargus Urquhart about the history of Black Isle and Obsidian – the legacy, the future and what’s important in RPGs.

I probably overreacted, but upon hearing what Feargus Urquhart said, I imagined the end of an era. He once said that he’d do another Fallout, before he’d ride off into the sunset. It sounded bold, promising and sad at the same time. It reminded us that someday even such a titan would retire. But, boy, what a legacy would he have left.

The man worked, managed or helped to deliver legendary titles that basically shaped the RPG corner of western gaming industry. Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Fallout 2. Not enough? Here we go for more. Knights of the Old Republic 2, The Outer Worlds, Pillars of Eternity, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Fallout: New Vegas. The list can go on, after all he’s the president of the Obsidian Entertainment. Before that, he helped Black Isle in forging the forementioned legends of the genre. He was the veteran of Interplay in its heydays.

In 1999 he won the Unsung Hero of the Year award (courtesy of IGN’s RPG Vault), because he “didn’t consider his contributions that important.” It appears that war isn’t the only thing that never changes. The year is 2022, a couple of days before Christmas Eve. We meet through Zoom and the man on the other side of the web (and the planet) is humble, smiling and armed with many things to say. We talked for almost an hour about what bothered him, about his influence on Black Isle and Obsidian’s games. About tough lessons, times and triumphs. I also tried to squeeze anything about that, absolutely hypothetical, new Fallout (seriously hypothetical, Obsidian’s got their hands full right now with developing three games). So, let’s see what came from that conversation.

The Future​

Hubert Sosnowski (Gamepressure.com): The initial spark for this interview was your simple quote: “I would always personally say my hope is that before I ride off into the sunset, I'd love to make another Fallout game.” How much does Fallout mean to you? What Fallout as a game, or an idea, is for Feargus Urquhart?

Feargus Urquhart: I need to go back many, many years into the past. When I was ten or eleven, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. I, a kid who was a little bit of a dork – or a lot of a dork [smiles] – it was an impulse to start reading fantasy. Tolkien, the Spellsinger series by Alan Dean Foster, Belgariada by David Eddings. I really enjoyed this whole adventure in another world.


That went into my high school years, I became part of a gaming club, so now it was a larger group thing. Earlier it was three or four of us playing DnD. It created this love of mine for that type of game, storytelling, characters and getting to do what you want. I love board games, they were always in my house. But role-playing games are different, and they give you this ability to be who you are, or who you want to be, in some strange world. Fast forward – I went to college and got my job in the game industry. In 1996 I got the opportunity to work on RPGs. The first of these was just Dungeons & Dragons for Interplay. I was put in charge of that division and Fallout wasn’t originally a part of that. But!

I was friends with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarski and we kept talking. It’s wrong to say they needed help. They needed… support. To focus on a game, they needed more support from Interplay – resources and things like that. So, Fallout came into the RPG division that became Black Isle Studios. What’s important to me about it is that Fallout was the first game I got to work on that embodied that feeling of DnD, the adventure, the characters, the agency. We used the word “agency” all the time to underline that you can make your own decisions and be who you are in this world. This crazy, wacky world of Fallout makes sense, you get it. It’s not like the real world, but it feels like a world you understand. Saying that you wanna be there is probably wrong [laughter].

HS: Ask the preppers.


FU: [Smiles]. It’s like Disneyland. It’s not real life, but it all makes sense and fits together, and you get to go – and like I said – be who you are, who you want to be in it. That is what resonated and maybe it’s just a little bit of my upbringing – I’m a cold war kid, and from that standpoint, the bombs make a lot of sense. I played a lot of Monopoly with my family, so the whole PIP-boy doing this [Feargus shows thumb up] is from that.

HS: I knew I recognized that guy!

FU: Yeah! And sorry, I said “PIP Boy,” because it’s the original name of the Vault Boy. But in general, all these things tied together what Fallout is for me. My upbringing, playing RPGs together, and the world where you’re out to survive. I think there’s some lizard-like part of our brains that likes that concept. We don’t really die there, let’s be honest, but we’d like to think that we could be this person in this world. With a Vault suit and a pocket knife.

HS: Ok, so Fallout is partially your origin story and partially expression of freedom in role-playing.

FU: Yeah, exactly.

HS: So, you basically started with Fallout, and you would also make it your final hurrah. What would be that final Disneyland, your final Fallout, and expression of freedom?

FU: I hate to get boring answers, but it’s just to get people and put them back into that world. That’s it. I may have a different view of making games than other people. For example, Avatar 2 just came out and James Cameron spent ten or fifteen years making it. Back then, we were talking with them about making an Avatar 2 game… I don’t even know how long ago. Eight, six years, something like that.




With Cameron, there are those masterpieces, and for me a lot of making games is just getting to put people in these worlds and having them have an amazing time. I don’t need every game I made to be Avatar 2, right? You must have this desire to design things awesome, of course. It’s not that you start with this attitude „meh, just put something out meh,” that’s not it at all. But it’s also that idea, that I’ve always seen my career as one of many games. Not one of a single game.

So, if we do another Fallout, I see this as the next chapter of Fallout, not the final chapter. And that’s what is interesting to me, because it’s a little bit of freeing to not have to make something that must be the most amazing game or movie or book. Because then you’d be trapped, if you say that to yourself or to the public. All I want to do with our games – and if we’re going to do another Fallout – is to say, what we’re going to like? What do we think will be better? What would people like? What would they think will be better? What did we learn in the last two, five, ten years? And then – go make that world. Use the PC or the console to make an amazing-looking world. But know that, what’s more important are the stories and the characters and the things that players can do in that world. And that’s Fallout. It’s about giving people that real expression of the world and letting them just go play.

HS: So, you’ve basically just gone into my trap and that’s perfect, because I was going to ask what your next Fallout would be about? Not in terms of specific plotline, but in terms of themes, design principles, maybe being a vehicle for modern divisions in society. I don’t know if you had the same feeling, but when I played New Vegas this year and met Caesar's Legion for the first time, I felt it resembled some groups of, well, people who got lost, both in your country and mine, due to similar problems but coming from different backgrounds. It’s like the same divisions but coming from a different source. When I played Fallout, I felt that wonderful paradox, that you’re in another world, but then you have feedback for the real one. I also had that feeling of ruthless social commentary with The Outer Worlds. So, are there any problems that bothers you and your crew – problems that could be put into the next Fallout game? Ideas that you want to show? Hopes or warnings for the future?

FU: [Laugh] So it’s always good for me to start off with answering a question like that by saying very distinctly: we’re not working on Fallout, and we haven’t even talked about what it would be.




HS: Of course. We’re talking about a purely hypothetical game.

FU: Right, but I can talk about how I personally look at Fallout. One thing I can kind of look back at is – I got a lot of questions about Fallout 3. A lot of journalists were trying to trap me, because they wanted me to say something like “Oh, Fallout 3 is not a real Fallout, because it’s not like Fallout or Fallout 2, it’s not turn-based.” Why I’m bringing this up is because of what Fallout 3 did. Every time we make a Fallout game it’s about that world.

And you’re correct. I believe our Fallouts are some reflections on our world. Or as you said, the Outer Worlds, though it was Tim Cain’s and Leonard Boyarski’s work, but they of course also did Fallout 1 and started Fallout 2. Maybe it’s because of how we make roleplaying games, but of course we have overall themes, storylines. But then, what we do is to turn parts of the game over to groups of people, the pods, strike teams, who are given freedom to go make that part of the game. I think more so maybe than how a lot of other games get made.

It’s a distinct belief of mine that I’m not brilliant. I’m fairly creative, but how you get incredible creativity is by giving people some guidelines and then just letting them go. I think what comes out of that is that people speak to what’s going on with themselves and what’s going on with the world around them.

I guess on part, and an odd answer to your question, is: I don’t know. I don’t know what those themes are purposely because these are the stories that teams, the pods are going to tell themselves about the regions that they’re making. There are some overarching things, you’re absolutely right. When Josh talked about Fallout New Vegas, he came up with these ideas, who are the NCR, who are The Powder Gangers, who are the people in Goodsprings, who’s in Caesar’s Legion, who’s Caesar himself. That’s the throughline. That’s like the colors that many teams take into each of the parts of the game they make, but then they tell their own stories with those characters. So, you get that craziness – not that craziness of Caesar's Legion, they make sense...!

HS: In every specific sense...!

FU: [Laughs]. Exactly, in a very specific sense. As for the second part of the answer. Whether it’s Fallout or another game I get to make, I think of a couple of interesting themes. One is responsibility. I want to go and make an RPG story about personal responsibility. I think that’s an important conversation to be had. About people being responsible.

I also like the ideas that were put into The Outer Worlds but taken to the very crazy end. You know, about corporations and that kind of stuff, but for now I have no idea if that’s something that would happen. But still, it’s the idea of how you’d give more of this sense of responsibility to the player that would be interesting to explore.

HS: Responsibility for what? Personal actions? The world around us?

FU: I think of those two. You have the responsibility. You are responsible for things and your actions matter.

And it can be an interesting time for that RPG to be made. We do the best job, when we really understand what the player is going to do in our game and then we show the reactions to that. Those can be subtle things; they cannot be not subtle things. I mean, we do our best job, when we help the player see what happened or did not happen because of what they did or didn’t do. That’s how you reinforce that feeling of responsibility for your actions.




HS: Is there some specific aspect of this responsibility or something that you’re afraid of? Sorry, you won’t escape that easily! If you were the part or leader of one of those Fallout pods – is there something you would tell by Fallout? Just something you as a person or a gamer would tell by Fallout. One story, one dilemma.

FU: [Laughs.] I know, I know. Sometimes when you’re trying to set up the system in the game, you’re figuring out what the player is trying to do, what would they figure out how to do, and how to get the game to respond to it. That can create something, which can be called personal rules.

I’ll give an example from something I actually put into Fallout 1. It must be the response to the actions of the player. In the Hub in FO1 there’s a store that has lots of really good equipment in there. The way that Fallout 1 works is that you could walk up to the table and just take things that you could otherwise buy. It’s something that Tim really wanted. The tester found out – because we didn’t do a good job at protecting things – they could just wander around level 5 and steal the equipment they should have around level 15. That made the game much easier.

We thought “Ok, this is a problem.” So, I’d figured out: let’s put guards in there. They were really high level, but! We also really wanted to make people feel like there’s a chance to get the stuff away. So, we put the guards in very specific spots, so the players could try. There was a really slim chance that you could still do a couple things and get out without getting killed. We also made it that at some level, you get to the point, when you’re more powerful than the guards. You can then come, kill them and get the stuff if you want to be that kind of character.

Why I’m bringing it about corresponds to the theme of responsibility. I want to set up these rules that the player understands. What comes out of that is: for themselves, players can decide to go and steal all the stuff or not steal all the stuff later. So, they get to be who they want to be that way. But more so, we basically set up that the game reinforces that if they try to do something, it’s going to have a bad effect on them. It’s not like every time a player goes against the rules of society in the game, they get shot.




It’s an example of looking at any of our games broadly and asking: what are all the ways that people are going to act in this game? And then reacting to that. Whatever the theme of personal responsibility could – or maybe not – do, it’s just that the entire game must reinforce that. How NPCs talk to you based on what you did or you didn’t do. Like the stealing, putting the player in jail. Making people feel good about being good or making them feel good about being bad. That’s something that’s really important in games and something that reinforces the personal responsibility – and I have to give 100% credits to Chris Avellone for this. In the early days of Obsidian he kept on pushing this. In the past, when the player was bad, we made it negative, but the idea is that we want to encourage the player to be who they want to. There’s an extent, where you can do that. If we want the player to feel like a bad person or like somebody who gets something through force and we’re allowing that playstyle, then we have to give them positive feedback on playing that way. It was not how we thought, when we were early in our careers.

HS: So, is there a modern problem that you would made part of the game?

FU: Probably the thing that I think about the most is the environment. I do think about what’s happening, I don’t know how you would reflect that in the game, because you don’t wanna punch someone in the face with it. That’s not how things change. I don’t know if that would ever be a theme. If we're going to include something like that, we’d have to figure out how to represent that in a game in a way that was interesting. That’s our job. To give you and everybody else games to have fun.

There are games in the industry that have a specific purpose and I think people understand that and they’re fine with that going in, but the bigger RPGs that we make are about people going in and enjoying themselves. About feeling successful, feeling a sense of escape. Whatever theme we may want to tell, it has to take a backseat to the player’s enjoyment. We can be subtle, we can do it in interesting ways, but we still understand what’s our job. It’s not to show and tell „Look how amazing we are and you just have to love our game, because we made it.” We have an incredible responsibility for the person that goes in, downloads our game for 40-70 dollars. That’s a lot of money for people, so also – a lot of responsibility. We don’t want to preach. If we have some message here, that’s great, but it can be something that the player has to focus on more than the fun and experience of being in that world.

The Past​

HS: I get it, the theme of responsibility is really strong in this one. And now, we’re slowly getting close to the more dangerous question. But first, something about you. Games are a collaborative effort, but how much of Feragus Urquhart was in Obsidian, Black Isle and earlier Interplay’s games?

FU: My job through my career has been the business, the people. It has been figuring out what is the box that we need to go to in order to plan accordingly. I have had some lower-level impact on games. Sometimes I have worked as a manager on them. I was the lead designer of Fallout 2. I ran a Combat Strike Team for a while. I was in charge of the UI in one game. I was putting all of the art assets into Knights of the Old Republic 2 for many months. Probably the largest impact I’ve had on a game that people saw was with Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I wrote dialogues, created items, designed maps and a lot of that stuff. My biggest influence through the years has been helping people figure out what it is that we’re going to go make.




I often use Planescape: Torment as an example. In 1996 I took over the RPG division and I was trying to figure out what was going on. There were at least three Planescape games being made. Without enough people to work on any of them [laughs]. I’ve come to the division having already worked with Bioware on Shattered Steel. It wasn’t done yet. We were just signing them up for what would become Baldur's Gate, at the time we were calling it Iron Throne. What I did with Planescape: Torment was saying “We need to use the Baldur’s Gate engine, let’s make it more character-focused rather than party-focused. A lot of it should take part in Sigil, The City of Doors and you need to go to at least three Planes, because it’s Planescape. We can’t not go to Planes.” There was more, but ultimately I did that. The game that the team went with wasn’t the game that I would’ve made if I was the game director, but they fulfilled those things. The way they did it is what made Planescape: Torment so awesome.

HS: So, basically, you’re responsible for the overall shape of one of the most bizarre and mind-blowing RPGs out there.

FU: [Laughs.] I should get a little credit, but ultimately it’s not a lot of credit. The only other thing I did on a Planescape was combat. There’s a lot of criticism of combat in Torment. They said it’s really secondary and things like that. Three months before we shipped the game, I came in and I made combat a lot better [laughs], but I was only able to get it to that point. I focused a lot on leveling and making it work well for warrior, thief and mage. I did a lot of that nuance, but the story and the characters and a lot of that was all Chris. I mean, there were very minor things I had to tweak at the end, but the rest was Avellone.


HS: But you pushed it in the right direction.

FU: In terms of story, characters it was all him. I’ve just went and played the first two hours of Torment again to see how we did stuff back then and it was very interesting. Chris did such a good job of making it interesting and just transparent enough in terms of the world, rules, and all that kind of stuff. You were introduced really slowly, little by little, but again, you were getting that flavor. You totally got into it. How we did that was amazing. As for the other example. It’s about The Outer Worlds.

We talked a lot about what we’re going to make and we very specifically got into this area of sort of a hard SF. It was like the late 80’s, early 90’s SF, very Alien-inspired. Not in the way that you’re going to kill aliens, but from the standpoint of that kind of chunkiness. I’ve written a lot about creating this dystopian world. I had seeds of ideas and Tim and Leonard ran with it. And changed 99% of it. But again that was a focus for drawing a box in the beginning. I think it was important to me with Outer Worlds that we went to multiple planets to meet what it would feel like an SF game. That was something I pushed on.


I have more stories like that, but a lot of what I do is looking at the teams and understanding the makeup of the team. Asking the questions, making sure if we have the right number of people. Running these big teams now is very hard. Game director is in charge of a hundred people. When they start the job, they maybe know 50 of them. So I may know more of them than the director does. A lot of that job is steering those teams to get the right people together, the right focus. The last things that I focused a little bit more on recently were art and lightning. We were so focused on the stories so much that we missed the outward presentations. I see this as one of my responsibilities – to make our games received well. To make our games look pretty good. So those are some of the impacts.

HS: So how hard is it to manage all those crazy, charismatic artists, writers, creators?

FU: I mean, they’re people, right? You want very smart, creative people, who believe in what they’re doing. They’re sometimes hard to work with, but you want that. That’s the deal. You want the pods of those people doing their own thing within the broader box and guidelines that we have. It can be frustrating to work with people who have strong opinions, but stuff like that makes a good game. In essence I can wake every morning and be frustrated, but that’s the job. I can complain about it to friends just to get it out of my system, but in the end it’s nothing I would ever change. That’s the agreement we had at the studio level – to have with teams and the subteams.

Let’s go back to the Torment example. There were those things that I wanted them to do. Baldur’s Gate engine, more focus on a character, go to three planes, be in Sigil. I checked in a month ago and they did not have anything in Sigil. They may had a lot of reasons why that’s the case. And they felt very strongly about it. I said “Ok, let’s talk about it.” That’s what I always do. We talk about it, but you have to remember that you cannot change the core things about our social contract. We give you incredible freedom within the mentioned box, but that’s the box. If you want to change the box, if we’ve talked about it first, you can go off and do it. That’s where the most friction occurs between teams or parts of teams. Either the guidelines are not clear, which creates frustration, or the guidelines are clear, but the people have moved off them without talking about it. But that really is how you manage those large teams.

You have to get those very few, clear guidelines and you are always checking the game against those guidelines. It’s human nature to move on and forget, so my job is also to say “Hey, this is what we’ve all said and wanted to make. If I get the game today and compare it to these six things – three of them are perfect, two are somewhat ok, and with the last one you’re way off, so what’s going on?” It sounds very simple, but you can’t have a very complicated system if you want to manage large teams.




HS: Did you have to make tough decisions, choices? Were there some failures, hard times that reshaped you either in terms of management or design? The history was rough at times.

FU: I will go back to Fallout 1. Towards the end of the game, I wanted the player to get rewarded for doing some stuff. I had to create what we called “The Turbo Plasma Rifle,” which was the plasma rifle that took one less Action Point to use. The problem was that the amount of damage you could do per AP was way off the charts. It made that part of the game too easy and it was too late for us to understand. So, I personally unbalanced Fallout at the end of the game.

So, I always reflect that little changes can have a big effect. But on the flip side, and another example from Fallout, is I held the game at the end to change the bargain equation. It was the effect of your barter skill on prices. I held it because I was doing all the math. The economy towards the end of the game would be a disaster. It would seem awesome to the player, because if they pumped all these things to the barter, they’d be getting things for almost nothing. Almost for free. So we held the game and made the curve that flattened out how much the skill would affect prices. It was the right decision, it kept the economy functioning better towards the end of the game. That was a good lesson for knowing that it’s ok to hold games to fix a thing that may or may not seem minor.

I learned a lot between Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 2, they shipped quite close together. The latter one came out very buggy. Way much buggier than we’d thought. That was the lesson in obtaining good information from QA. In asking questions like “Do we have enough testers? Are they testing the right thing?” And five, ten, fifteen other questions. That was a thing that you could wind through a lot of our games. People make the joke that we’re “Bugsidian.” We’ve worked our asses off over the last 10-12 years to ship games that were not buggy. And our game has not been buggy.

But I recognize it because we had a reputation, so any bug in our game is horrible. I don’t want to feel like a victim or something, but sometimes I feel, like we get graded a little harsher, whether there are bugs in our games or not, but we put a ton of tests on our games, we have great lead testers – and that’s something I had to learn through my career. It’s funny, because I started as a tester. But for now it’s more and more focused and understanding what’s going on with our bug list and how we manage it. That’s an ongoing lesson. It’s important on my level. How often people in my position or higher should be reviewing the data in bug lists? That can tell you really quickly if your game is ready to ship.

The last lesson that I’ve learned was on South Park. We were working with Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They had a vision for combat. It’s about kids playing an RPG game in this South Park world. In Matt and Trey’s mind, the kids should just be hitting each other with sticks without many crazy abilities. For a long time, we were following that rule and combat just never felt like it’s as fun as it could be. And one day I talked to the combat team.

Matt and Trey stuck to their idea, so I just said to my team that we’re not going to do that. We’re going to make abilities, we’re going to make it crazy, fun and then we’re going to work on this for a couple of months. Then I took the result to Matt and Trey and explained that “We didn’t do what you wanted us to. And this is why. I will give it to you to play for one hour and then I come back, and you can tell me what you think.” So, I came back and they said it was the right decision. We had a lot of fun, it was the right level of difficulty. The abilities felt like the kid’s fantasy. I take that as a lesson that you have to go in your direction even if you’re told not to do so. You have got to try. With the Stick, I knew and the team knew that the combat had to be that way. We had to take the chance.

HS: So, sometimes you’re the darling-killer.

FU: Yeah.




HS: So in terms of tough decisions. How hard was it to survive two difficult eras – the collapse of Interplay and that time, when Obsidian was almost closed? What did it change in you as a creator and manager – or in the games you’ve made? (by the way, Pillars are awesome)

FU: [Laugh] Thank you. So what did I learn?... Like anyone, I have fears, but also I may have a lack of certain other fears. Like maybe I’m just optimistic? I just believe that we’re going to figure it out. Of course, in the middle of the night I’m sitting there sweating and tired, thinking “Forget it, I’m waking in the morning and packing it all up.” But in the end, I always try to think we’re going to make it awesome, we’re going to get there.

Looking at Interplay – it was a conscious decision to leave because I didn’t think we could be successful anymore. I lost the desire to try to do it there and I didn’t feel we were supported. We made all the money, but I felt that we were supported the least. It was a fight. I’ll share one example. People were working on two-year old computers. In today's work, we can all work on two-year-old computers and it’s totally fine. In 2003 that kind of computer was a disaster for a game developer. I went and got 10 new computers approved, and approved they were. I thought they were purchased. They didn’t show up and I found out that the purchase had been canceled, so I went back, got them reapproved, and then they were canceled again.

So, it was decided that the director of technology in Interplay would have to approve the computers. He wanted to go through and know what we put in the computers. Running a dev studio back in a day, you intimately knew every part of every computer. When we started Obsidian, we even made computers, I can build a PC. But back then at Interplay, it was the frustration of not being trusted and not being given enough money to buy ten computers. For a team of sixty people.

I say it that way is because it made it easy to leave. It’s almost like they kicked me out the door. Sometimes people tell me that it must have taken a lot of courage to leave the Interplay. It did, of course – my wife was pregnant and we just bought a new house a couple of years before. There were a lot of things changing, so it took courage, but they also made it easy for me to have that courage.

As for Obsidian. Of course, we lost a few projects in our time. When Microsoft canceled Stormlands, that was the hardest, because we were going to work on an Xbox launch title. It was like signing up for the holy grail of games. Original IP for a console launch... aaand it got canceled. We just didn’t get a lot of backup then and we got to do a big lay off. We laid off people that had been with us for a long time. I still regret that. We had to make decisions very quickly. It was a hard time. But we got through it. I have to give Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke a lot of credit for pushing me to do the Kickstarter. I didn’t know what’s going on with that totally, but they did. And it was super successful.

I don’t remember when this meeting took place, but we were looking ahead a year and we were starting to worry about how to design big games. Because we needed to go and make publishers give us 50-60-70 million dollars. That’s a hard thing to get somebody to give you 50 million dollars [laugh]. And I asked “What are we going to do? Do we either swing for the fences? We’re going to put it all into it, or we should wrap it up? This can’t be something in the middle. It would mean that we’re going to limp a long and end up in a crappy place.” We all agreed, we’re going to put it all into it. That was a super important thing for me to do. It aligned us to say “Hey, we’re really doing this instead of thinking: how do we close this down?”.




HS: It was a lot of tough choices [Feargus nods]. But after all, when I look at Obsidian, it worked.

FU: Exactly.

The Present​

HS: So, in spite of this all, what was your greatest triumph?

FU: One greatest triumph? We survived. That’s it. We survived. We’ve been acquired, so we’re not independent anymore, but overall – there’s not a lot of independent developers that survived that long. Next year’s our 20th anniversary as Obsidian. I would say the other thing that makes us proud is that you look across all our games and I’m proud of all of them. For real. Are some of them better than others? Of course. But I’m proud of all of them and the teams that made them were proud of them. If I made that possible for teams to be proud of what they made then that’s my triumph. I get enjoyment from seeing their pride and happiness from what they’ve made. And, of course, seeing people react positively and enjoying our games. Or aspects of our games sometimes.

If I go all the way back, starting with Fallout or even some of the original games I worked on – I’m proud of Rock On Racing on Sega Genesis. Because I had to learn how to sing a song. I’ve never licensed a song before – I’d figured it all out. And then, when you go through all those Interplay years we had such a great relationship with Bioware and I worked super hard at that. And this gave the world Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. My support of the Fallout 1 team. I doubled their team, I got more people to help Fallout become what it is. I mean, it’s just management. Fallout wasn’t because of me, I just helped. There’s a lot of triumphs. But I’ll go back to the fact that the triumph of Obsidian is that we survived and kept on making the games that we love making.

HS: The last question, the dangerous one. I have to ask! Is there any chance for this hypothetical new Fallout from Obsidian to occur?

FU: We’re not working on it right now, our plate is pretty full with Avowed, Grounded and Outer Worlds 2. I don’t know when we’re going to start talking about new games, maybe towards the end of next year [conversation took place before Christmas 2022 – ed. note]. We just have to see what’s going on. That’s the best way to say it. There’s nothing in the plans, nothing on the piece of paper that says that. But I’ll stick to what I said. I would love to make another Fallout before I retire. I don’t know when that is, I don’t have a date of my retirement. It’s funny – you can say I’m already 52, or only 52. It’s one of those two, depending on the day. My hope is that’ll happen, but we’ll have to wait and see.

 

[Cross]

I like the part where Feargus clarifies that his main contribution to Planescape: Torment was the shitty combat.

HS: So, basically, you’re responsible for the overall shape of one of the most bizarre and mind-blowing RPGs out there.

FU: [Laughs.] I should get a little credit, but ultimately it’s not a lot of credit. The only other thing I did on a Planescape was combat. There’s a lot of criticism of combat in Torment. They said it’s really secondary and things like that. Three months before we shipped the game, I came in and I made combat a lot better [laughs], but I was only able to get it to that point. I focused a lot on leveling and making it work well for warrior, thief and mage. I did a lot of that nuance, but the story and the characters and a lot of that was all Chris. I mean, there were very minor things I had to tweak at the end, but the rest was Avellone.

HS: But you pushed it in the right direction.

FU: In terms of story, characters it was all him. I’ve just went and played the first two hours of Torment again to see how we did stuff back then and it was very interesting. Chris did such a good job of making it interesting and just transparent enough in terms of the world, rules, and all that kind of stuff. You were introduced really slowly, little by little, but again, you were getting that flavor. You totally got into it. How we did that was amazing.

 

[Roguey]

I wonder if Avellone is still angry enough to write a rebuttal to this.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

FU: For example, Avatar 2 just came out and James Cameron spent ten or fifteen years making it. Back then, we were talking with them about making an Avatar 2 game…

Of fucking course. Always aim for the lowest denominator, make the most sheeple oriented games for the widest, most retarded audience. The neat little Feargus Credo that turns RPGs into shit.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

I can't help but respect Feargus for consistently giving Avellone all the credit he deserves. And for that Feargus had no part in defaming Chris when he was accused of a crime against all the world's women. He could have said something along the lines that Avellone was a toxic and unpleasant type, and that he is not surprised by the accusations against Avellone. But he didn't. Considering how much shit Avellone has said here about Feargus, that's quite a feat.

 

[NecroLord]

I can't help but respect Feargus for consistently giving Avellone all the credit he deserves. And for that Feargus had no part in defaming Chris when he was accused of a crime against all the world's women. He could have said something along the lines that Avellone was a toxic and unpleasant type, and that he is not surprised by the accusations against Avellone. But he didn't. Considering how much shit Avellone has said here about Feargus, that's quite a feat.

Any recent developments on the Avellone countersuit?

 

[Roguey]

Any recent developments on the Avellone countersuit?

The two lawsuits should be resolved by the end of this year.

 

[Ismaul]

I can't help but respect Feargus for consistently giving Avellone all the credit he deserves.

Agreed.

It seems that at the very least the old guard at Obsidian were purposefully like this, insisting on giving credit where credit is due, as if it was company policy. One positive aspect of their company culture. All their interviews over the years have been like that, even when at Interplay; be it with MCA who really goes out of his way to praise others, Josh, Tim and Leon, and even others I forgot about.

But given the internal dysfunctions, you wonder if it's more a face they're putting up for PR, an ideal they wish they lived up to but don't, or if it's genuine. Maybe also a legal thing?

 

[Roguey]

A relatively new hire has a positive Glass Door review for Obsidian:

A culture of respect, trust, and love of craft
Jan 14, 2023 - Area Designer in Irvine, CA


Pros

- Highly social and welcoming environment of people who love and study games - Every individual is valued for their opinions, work output, and expertise - Significant and sustained effort to eliminate crunch and game-industry-related workplace toxicity - Fantastic production team that keeps projects on target and in scope, reducing stress on teams and eliminating the need for unhealthy work-life balance - Employees have the ability to and are encouraged to work outside of the bounds of their role so long as they remain transparent about those efforts - Positive culture of support for employees at every level of experience—folks are always ready and willing to help teach new hires and grow the skills of those around them - Phenomenal benefits for salaried employees (healthcare especially), generous PTO, sick time, holidays, maternity/paternity, and even bonuses

Cons

- Pace of work can feel daunting at times, despite the overall lack of need for overtime - Senior folks can often be stuck tanking the hardest tasks with little down time - Less rigid team structures may feel confusing or meandering for folks used to much more top-down teams

Advice to Management

Not much at all, management has been wonderful in a way unlike any company I've ever worked at. They truly value every employee as a human being and not just as a cog in the machine—and do so with more than just words

This might have been coached, I don't know.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

This Glassdoor review might being written by Matthew Loyola (Pentiment's Area Designer).

 

[Roguey]

(Pentiment's Area Designer)

Yeah, it'd make sense if this was written by someone who worked only on Pentiment or Grounded and not the Avowed dumpsterfire (unless the Microsoft babysitter truly worked a miracle and fixed the company).